The feeds were served by the standard [...]]]> Apart from its own Ice Tea tech blog, Dipot.com also displays two external feeds relating to Optimization and Standards. I needed to optimize the post titles of these two feeds by getting rid of their long suffixes, both for better looks and for more content within the same space.

The feeds were served by the standard RSS WordPress 2.7.1 widget, which is fine, except it does not support much customization. After some search, I found Advanced RSS 1.0.1 WordPress plugin and KB Advanced RSS 2.1.3 WordPress plugin. Smart RSS only works until WP 2.7.0 and I didn’t want to tweak with that. Advanced RSS only works until WP 2.6.2 and requires PHP5, DOM and XSL extensions loaded on the server and I don’t want to depend on those if I don’t need to, so the choice was easy.

Installation of KB Advanced RSS worked flawlessly right from within wp-admin. Then, on my first attempt to configure it, I came across a problem which could very well had been a show stopper: for some reason, except for the feed’s URL and Title, the widget would not commit any of the other parameters to the “Options” table of the database. Troubleshooting this issue, I ended up reading all the users’ comments on the plugin’s site. As usual, I was not alone; this is a common issue. Thankfully, Wesley of  http://www.improvingtheweb.com had already posted the solution to PHP4 not committing widget field changes in WordPress. The solution worked like a charm. And, as expected, when I later upgraded to PHP5 the problem wasn’t even there to begin with.

KB Advanced RSS is well thought-out, very straight forward with good documentation and examples. It supports all the features of the standard widget (including multiple instances) plus formatting and full support of all the feed’s fields to display or not (including the debugging tool to show which these fields are)! It further supports two modifiers to optionally manipulate the string before display, by taking out a number of characters from the start (ltrim) and/or trimming it to a specific length (trim).

Alas, what I actually needed was to take out a number of characters from the end of the string. Fortunately, as it turned out, KB Advanced RSS’s code is pretty straight-forward and extending it with my own modifier (rtrim) to do just that was only a matter of 3 lines of PHP code added to the version of the plugin that runs by my version of Wordpress; there’s one for versions up to 2.7 (pre-wp-2-7.php) and one for versions after that (post-wp-2-7.php). Here is the PHP code from the modified post-wp-2-7.php (my rtrim extension is in blue):

///////////////////////////////// CUSTOMIZATIONS /////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// If you want to write customizations, put them here. The variable to modify is $text. See the FAQ.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// right trimming
// cuts $rtrim characters from the right
// by ageor, April 9, 2009
$rtrim = (is_numeric($rtrim) && 0<$rtrim) ? (int) $rtrim : null;
if (is_int($rtrim))
$text = substr( $text, 0, strlen($string)-$rtrim );

// left trimming:
$ltrim = (is_numeric($ltrim) && 0<$ltrim) ? (int) $ltrim : null;
if (is_int($ltrim))
$text = substr( $text, $ltrim );

// length trimming (do after left trimming)
$trim = (is_numeric($trim) && 0<$trim) ? (int) $trim : null;
if (is_int($trim))
$text = substr( $text, 0, $trim );

return $text;

The way this is written, the string in question can undergo any mix of all three trimming types necessary.

All setting up and troubleshooting took place by adding one instance of the widget and configuring it, then a second instance. When all was done and I had what I wanted, I removed the original two instances of the original RSS widget, positioned the new ones on top and saved, certain I was done. However, as the resulting “Widgets” Wordpress admin page suggested after saving, something was very wrorg. It displayed the message ‘You are using 3 widgets in the “Left Sidebar” sidebar’ but not the widgets themselves, nor the “Save Changes” button. Sure enough, I ended up with an unworkable site, as these where the first 2 widgets on the left column of Ice Tea tech and the page that appeared ended with the title banner. Disaster!

To cut a long story short, plenty of “trial and error”s later and with the help of Vicki of neTWire, here is my conclusion: For KB Advanced RSS widget to work with WP 2.7.1 and the Atahualpa WordPress theme, the WordPress RSS widget needs to be activated and positioned above it. That’s how I temporarily solved my problem, until (if ever) I have the time to look deeper into the code involved or newer versions of  the theme and/or the plugin solve it for good.

Just to be clear, none of the problems and troubleshooting it took to solve them can be traced back ato KB Advanced RSS alone. Atahualpa is a great but complex theme and it is their combination that turned out to be problematic. It’s not the first example of a bad mix and it won’t be the last. On the flip side, with each such incident we get to learn something new that will potentially save others and ourselves some frusrtation and time in the future.

A Remarkable Book from Wiley-Finance

---

"An excellent book!"   — Paul Wilmott Want to break into the lucrative world of trading and quantitative finance? You need this book!

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This bookmark links to http://mashable.com/2009/03/29/sharing-great-posts/

This bookmark links to http://live.classroom20.com/2/post/2009/03/moodle-in-education-special-guest-miguel-guhlin.html

This bookmark links to http://mashable.tumblr.com/post/72589347

This bookmark links to http://kcorax.net/blog/post/2009/03/15/From-the-Assembly-language-to-Cloud-Computing-and-the-DNA-to-the-Mankind.aspx

I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a [...]]]>

I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a flood in the blog itself and to its RSS feed, FriendFeed & Twitter by extension.

I stopped using StumbleUpon a while ago, because it didn’t support greek-encoded titles. It seems there is also an issue between its feed and Autoblogger. So, at least for the time being, I removed it, which is not that much of a problem, as I don’t post there any more.

Sorry about that, I’ll try to contain such incidents in the future. Thank you all for your patience and especially @Sotomi, @Cybereddie, @Chriiiiis, @Botchagalupe, @Alexnewbee, @Skoroneos, @Jimeh, @Vtripolitakis, @Spdd and those I may have missed for taking the time to notify me about it.

In an attempt to minimize the impact, I erased all the Ice Tea tech feed (with posts) from FriendFeed (I don’t know how to bulk-erase the relevant twits, any ideas?). The sideffect is that, as I am about to recreate the feed in FriendFeed, multiple blog and bookmark posts will appear at once, possibly in Twitter as well. Please forgive me, hopefully it will be the end of this annoyance.

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This bookmark links to http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/01/21/21-ways-to-write-posts-that-are-guaranteed-to-grow-your-blog/

As I mention from time to time, I never have enough of a good thing. FriendFeed is more than good, it’s great. Greatness has a tencency to increase expectations. These are a few optimization suggestions to raise the experience from “great” to “near perfect” (as new requests will probably always exist):

During my early days as an IT support person (well before USB flash drives, external hard disks and recordable CDs), I picked up the habit to not be dependent on anything not included in Windows (v. 3.0, at the time) if I could help it. So I got used to working on the setups my [...]]]>

During my early days as an IT support person (well before USB flash drives, external hard disks and recordable CDs), I picked up the habit to not be dependent on anything not included in Windows (v. 3.0, at the time) if I could help it. So I got used to working on the setups my clients did.

I rarely support people this way any more. Although old habits die hard, I increasingly get used to my own, optimized setup. I am a Windows person wishing for a Linux future, so, I keep trying to use software also available for it in an effort to prepare for the switch at some point. I also prefer portable applications, ones that can run fully configured from a flash disk. Firefox is my browserfits these specs plus there is a plethora of great, value-adding add-ons to optimize it.

This is the list of the Add-ons I can’t live without (in alphabetical order):

1. Better GReader

As the name implies, Better GReader is a collection of scripts (also available for GreaseMonkey) that improve the Google Reader experience. I use the ones that bypass the GReader-iGoogle choice, color-code the list items, massively mark the items above the current one as read, show the feeds’ favicons and make better use of the window real estate to fit more items in each page. Among other choices, there’s also the preview item within GReader choice I know people like, but I don’t use it. Better GReader does not require GreaseMonkey to work.

2. DownThemAll!

“The mass downloader for Fireox”. GetRight is better, but it’s not free. The only item in my wishlish for DownThemAll is ability to change the saved name of the document.

3. FireFTP

Not everyone uses FTP any more. If you do, FireFTP covers all the bascis: local and remote “explorer” windows, permissions change, synchronization, initial folders after logon etc.

4. Google Toolbar for Firefox

Firefox does support several search engines out of the box and a lot more by customization. The Google Toolbar is very versatile and Google is my search engine of choice. I don’t use all of its features but those I do use save me a lot of clicks and data entry.

5. IE Tab

IE Tab is still one of the first add-ons I install, as it allows use of Internet Explorer’s rendering engine within a Firefox Tab. Furthermore it can remember IE-specific sites and kick-in automatically. I would prefer such sites did not exist (and they do tend to become extinct) but if you are a web developer, you need it anyway.

6. PDF Download

Earlier versions of Firefox did not work very well with acrobat documents. I think both Firefox and the acrobat plug-in have now improved but I’m still used to choosing whether to save or to just view a .pdf up front.

7. PlainOldFavorites

Windows and IE Favorites are not as compact as Firefox Bookmarks. I don’t like importing them, though; I prefer using PlainOldFavorites that adds a “Favorites” menu entry that works almost exactly like (Internet) Explorer’s. If only Shift Organize worked the same, it would be perfect! This is a must-have for people whose primary browser is IE.

8. Shareaholic

If you like to post sites you visit on an extensive list of supported services (including my favorites Delicious, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Twitter and many more), this is the tool of choice. Many sites use widgets for that but why not be prepared?

9. Split Browser

I can live without Split Browser, except when I can’t. Like on US election day and Obama’s inauguration, when I had a tab split into 3 or 4 panes to follow several video etc. streams at once. If you need it, you need it.

• Adblock Plus

Due to the debate whether blocking ads is hurting the Internet, I scruple about such add-0ns. Having said that, I asked about the most valuable Firefox add-on in Twitter and FriendFeed and the answer I got was Adblock. I am presenting Adblock Plus, which knows how to block many ads and is easily further configurable. Additionaly, four expansions, Adblock Plus Filter Uploader, Adblock Filterset.G Updater, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper and Adblock Plus Watcher help share our filters, update them automatically, hide text ads and debug Adblock Plus for even better results.

There go my most valuable of around 35 Firefox add-ons I use. Which browser do you use and how do you optimize it? Please do share!

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I like FriendFeed much better than Twitter; that’s no secret. In a conversation with @Trianta earlier today, it seems the only FriendFeed desktop clients out there are the Adobe Air-based Twhirl and feedalizr. They both leave a lot to be desired. There is also the announcement of  .NET-based FriendFeed Client. Web-based FriendFeed applications are also [...]]]>

I like FriendFeed much better than Twitter; that’s no secret. In a conversation with @Trianta earlier today, it seems the only FriendFeed desktop clients out there are the Adobe Air-based Twhirl and feedalizr. They both leave a lot to be desired. There is also the announcement of  .NET-based FriendFeed Client. Web-based FriendFeed applications are also scarce, compared to Twitter’s.

This isn’t a wish list. It’s a wish come true list, including existing applications that accomplish specific tasks and add great value to FriendFeed. True, there are many more than the following but those are my favorites (in no particular order):

1. Friendfeed Like Compatibility Calculator

FriendFeed stats only show 10 people who like me and another 10 that I like most. It’s not enough. Friendfeed Like Compatibility Calculator lists who gave a user the last 300 likes. Utilizing the 3 included modifiers, the list can show people with similar interests. It also shows the subscription status with a small “sub” next to each user. No password or passkey is required.


2. FriendZone?

Find out the top 100 subscribed to people among the people you subscribe to. This defines your friendfeed neighborhood, or FriendZone and results to contacts you may want to subscribe to, if not already. No password or passkey is required.

3. FriendVenn

This is one function FriendFeed should perform itself. FriendVenn answers who subscribes to you that you don’t subscribe to. Only for oneself, as it requires both username and password (not passkey). It returns 3 columns: “people you are subscribed to”, “people who both sub to you and you sub to” & “people who only subscribe to you” with totals for each.

4. Twitter2FF

Twitter2FF helps sync Twitter follows and FriendFeed subscriptions both ways. It requires usename/password for Twitter and username/passkey for FriendFeed. It then provides a one-page, one-click per user interface to invite or subscribe to Twitter friends in FriendFeed and follow FFd Friends in Twitter. It uses its own expanding database of Twitter-FriendFeed account pairs, as well as the Twitter feeds of people you subscribe to in FFd. Friendfeed recently added its own support to massively Find (and subscribe to) your Twitter friends on FriendFeed but Twitter2FF is still useful for the other half of the job.

5. FriendDeck

FriendDeck runs different concurrent FriendFeed searches live. Each result includes all poster’s details, the originating service and Like, Re-Share & Link ability.

6. FriendFeedLinks

“FriendFeedLinks is a memetracker that tracks links shared on FriendFeed”. It also makes them available via RSS.

7. ffholic

ffholic reports (collectively or per user) on the most Discussed, Liked, Commented, Popular or Active Entries, Users, Rooms, Photos, Music or Videos (not all combinations exist) for the last 1, 7 or 30 days. The good thing is Entries, Photos, Music & Videos reports are available in RSS feeds and include a language filter, powered by Google. Last but not necessarily least, ffholic also presents user metrics and calculates “activity points”.

Find more in FriendFeed Apps and, please, let me know of other FriendFeed apps, clients etc. that you find useful. There is also Robert Scoble’s discussion “To new friendfeeders (there are thousands due to Twitter invites and follows), here’s what you need to know:” on Friendfeed, with plenty of tips and links.

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I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to [...]]]>

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!

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I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally [...]]]>

I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally anticipated. Interestingly enough, there is a pattern and the flowchart works for me most of the time.

Also get the Posting Flowchart as built in Dia (hence the crudeness), for your own use. So, there it is:

Posting Flowchart

Please do comment. Is posting a one-way street for you? Are there any general rules or do you post on a case by case basis?

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First things first. I told them all in person and I’m saying it here as well. Special thanks go to Andrew Hyde, the mind behind Startup Weekends, Alexandros Pagidas, the person who brought it in Athens, Patrick Malone, our host in Microsoft Innovation Center venue (Patrick and Lydia, you definitely improved Microsoft’s image for all [...]]]>

First things first. I told them all in person and I’m saying it here as well. Special thanks go to Andrew Hyde, the mind behind Startup Weekends, Alexandros Pagidas, the person who brought it in Athens, Patrick Malone, our host in Microsoft Innovation Center venue (Patrick and Lydia, you definitely improved Microsoft’s image for all of us), the sponsors of the event (Domino’s, Loumidis, Coca Cola-3E, Wind; hopefully I am not forgetting anyone) and all the professionals who dropped in to give us a hand. I won’t go into the event itself. Others have already done that; follow the event’s site and the links all over this post for that.

In danger of giving the feeling of repetition to readers of other relevant posts, I’ll say it: Athens Startup Weekend was a successful event and proved several points (Greeks can actually work together without shouting or arguing all the time, previous acquaintance is not important, teams can form without guidance or many introductions etc.). Plus, it produced and set off a number of ideas that can eventually work.

Andrew mentioned that Startup Weekends are not meant to create viable startups over the weekend but, rather, form a community among the participants. In a private conversation he said only 4 such startups were created in Startup Weekend history so far (unfortunately I didn’t get the names). The event is meant to prove that people who didn’t know each other before can sit around the same table, share and expand on an idea and make the most out of it in a very short time-frame. The important thing is not the idea, but that these people can work together, add their talents to a cause and produce a combined result that’s greater than the sum of their individual strengths. At the end of the day, these people become potential partners/collaborators in these very same or other promising projects.

The event put the best out of us all. We expressed our opinions and discussed difficult matters (we sometimes knew nothing about) in a civil, productive manner. We all got out of there with some fresh ideas, some new potential friends and partners, the knowledge that talented, cooperative people are there waiting to be found and great accomplishments are so much closer than expected. Indeed, 10 great projects were born.

I consider myself privileged to have been a part of it and hope the event does go annual so we can experience it again.

Here are a few additional relative links (no particular order; I’ll be happy to add links I’ve missed):

• Athens Startup Weekend: brief recap
• Εντυπώσεις από το Athens Startup Weekend
• Athens Startup Weekend I
• Athens Startup Weekend
• Επιτυχημένη η συμμετοχή μας στο Athens Startup Weekend 2008 #ASW
• Introducing HowSocial.ru, a project of Startup Weekend Athens

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